Nekromantik (1987)
Dir. by Jörg Buttgereit (Butt-ger-right)
The movie tells the “story” of a Robert Schmadtke, a depraved wacko who, with his girlfriend Betty, gets off on bringing home pieces of dead bodies from his job with the J.S.A., a corpse-clean up company. When Robert brings home a full-sized, rotting corpse, he and Betty have a merry threesome, but soon he’s canned by the J.S.A. for being weird and smelling foul, so Betty leaves him. Haunted by visions of a farmer (perhaps his father) butchering and cleaning a rabbit, Robert turns to drinking and pills, visits a movie theater showing a porno-slasher movie and finally tries sex with a prostitute in a Cemetery, but nothing gets him off until he kills said prostitute. Awakened the next day by an old graveyard grounds-keeper, he kills the man with his own shovel and then heads home where he decides to end it all by performing seppuku on himself with a rusted knife while ejaculating.
The movie was apparently made in response to the harsh European Censorship of the time and it was released independently at midnight showings by Buttgeriet.
Notes on Nekromantik
- The first shot is the longest and loudest piss I’ve ever seen/heard in cinema. Wow. What a way to start.
- The title’s spooky print for NEKRO to the cursive of “mantik” is rather clever.
- Car accident aftermath is pretty striking. That’s a serious fucking mess! Hahaha. These guys clean up the bodies bare-handed and with garbage bags? LOL. The buzz saw going in the background makes the soundtrack as vile as the imagery.
- LOL. Guy just reaches in and pulls the driver’s eyeball out gingerly before they toss the rest of him in a Hefty cinch-sack.
- Holy shit. More piss. And did that guy casually wack it instead of giving his peen a little wiggle? Have I been getting out the last few drops the wrong way for my entire life?
- Dialogue sequence between body clean-up dispatcher and the site chief is a study in amateur framing, acting, writing, etc. Like a skit done by high-schoolers.
- Ah yes, the eyeball from earlier comes home with the weird dude the site chief was complianing about. And the dude’s got jars full of body parts just hanging out on shelves the way most people have books, DVDs or, I don’t know, Legos or PlayMobile sets.
- Is his girlfriend a mime or French? That black and white horizontal-striped shirt is a choice.
- Girl’s giving Mary Elizabeth Winstead vibes and I’m fine with her bathing in a blood bath because, hey, it’s still a bath.
- Oh shit. Goddamn, the poor rabbit. The fuck? Oh man… I did NOT see that coming. I should have expected they’d do something screwy in this movie because it’s so low budget, but the murder of the rabbit got me rather upset. Of course, people eat rabbit and it appeared to be cleaned for that purpose but WOW. Ugh. Hard to watch for fucking real. Sorry, Mike. Man… and they REALLY dwelled on it too. Almost like they used the real rabbit to distract from cheap-o effects of the autopsy.
- The comically awful set-up for the shotting accident involving a drunk dude shooting at bird’s and an apple-picker who falls on his gardening claw is painfully slow and stupid, with annoying music and ending as it only inevitably could.
- These body clean-up dudes bare-handing decomposing bodies is some rough trade. I was going to say “raw-dogging” in the parlance of our times, but let’s be real: at some point using that phrase in reference to what happens in this movie will be literally applicable, rather than metaphoircally.
- Something about me – I hate slimey stuff more than bloody stuff. When he brings that body home, damn, I’m in a test of my gag reflex. It’s… challenging. Then they kiss with the rotten slime on their hands. Goddamn. That’s gross. 30 minutes in and now we’re getting to the corpse-fucking! (Never thought I’d write that sentence. She put a copndom on the pipe she sticks inside the corpse? I guess we are not, in fact, araw-dogging. Wow… this is surprisingly as graphic and punk rock as I expected! Because I’m appreciably unsettled by this couple having a three-way with a severely decomposed corpse while tender piano music places in the background.
- Hahaha. The way they slowed the film down to the eye falling out of the socket would be more noticeable.
- Man. Ya boy got dirty fingernails to boot. Nasty.
- There’s a lot of Luis Buneul and Sergei Eisenstein silent film theory in use here – the idea of cross-cutting the disgusting with the mundane to make even things like eating dinner positively revolting.
- And here we get the most disturbing scene of cunnilingus this side of “Re-Animator!” Good times. Good times. And as she’s still a little Mary Elizabeth WInstead-esque, do I care?
- Picture of Charles Manson just handing in the bedroom. An eye for decor, indeed!
- Man, the lady dear-John’s him seconds after he is canned and complains about where he lives? YOU WERE FUCKING A CORPOSE EARLIER, LADY. The letter literally repeats what she said in the previous scene about wasting the best years of her life. My level of nervousness about this cat’s appearance in this movie after the rabbit scene is next level. I’m about to fly to Germany and kick Jörg Buttgereit’s ass. Oh good, ok. There was a cut after he put it in the bag. We good.
- And the dead cat 1/ doesn’t look anything like the cat in the previous scene and 2/ now has a knife in it? Also, attention distracted by the dude being starkers in the tub.
- Fake cat, but still gross. This actor, Daktari Lorenz, is seriously giving his all here. I mean, the prune hands alone in the ‘bathing in cat guts’ scene would be enough for me to tell the director to go fuck himself.
- Guy ahead of him in the movie theater line orders THREE BEERS to drink while catching a movie? The Germans really are something else.
- Ha. I’d rather watch the movie they’re watching in the movie theater than this one. And wow, they cut to a lot of scenes of it!
- No seriously. How long are we going to be in this movie theater scene?
- Damn. That was… pointless. Nothing happened in the movie scene. Like, at all. Nothing.
- When a man loses his corpse-fucking girlfriend and turns to the bottle and pills, you know things have gone sideways.
- The music score of this thing is like a first-grader’s cello recital overlaid with stock piano pieces.
- So, he takes pills, dreams of being a corpse himself with a beautiful woman bringing him a head in a box. Then runs through the hills joyously swinging a pork loin about. Yup. Ok.
- Oh good, more prostitutes. We’ve got a lot of movies with hookers in them on this show! Frankenhooker, Bordello of Blood, Pretty Woman and this! (three out of four where in the past two months!) Kills the cemetery groundskeeper with his own shovel by bisecting the dude’s head at the jaw line, thus making him a South Park Canadian!
- These moments of pastoral bliss are a real buzz kill, not gonna lie.
- Wait, is this movie setting up a joke about how people who fuck in bedrooms with Jesus on his cross hanging there are just like him, what with his corpse he’d hung on his wall? Because that’s pone hot fucking take!
- The fucking jizzing prosthetic dick at the end while he kills himself then shoots blood too! This is some kind of movie. Oh, but they brought back the rabbit, only it’s being played in reverse? Neat? But man, that rabbit’s last breaths are hard to watch, even in reverse.
- THE BUNNY LIVES!!!!! They missed the opportunity for the ending to land harder by having his girlfriend say something earlier about how the only way he’d be able to have sex with her again was if he was dead.
Bottom Five Romantic Horrors
If Nekromantik teaches us anything, it’s that love and rot aren’t as far apart as we’d like to think. There’s something inherently horrific about devotion pushed to its limits — about the way longing can make monsters of us, or the way a heartbeat can become a death rattle when it’s tethered to obsession. In horror, love rarely redeems; it infects, resurrects, mutates.
For me, this list isn’t about couples caught in scary situations. It’s about stories where love is the situation — where the emotional bond itself becomes the engine of terror. Some of these flicks are sensual, some are tragic, and a few are outright grotesque. But each, in its own way, reminds us that nothing in horror — not ghosts, demons, or even death — is more frightening than what we’ll do for the ones we love.
Here then are our Bottom Five Romantic Horrors, where love, lust, and devotion curdle into obsession, decay, and damnation.
5. Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
Directed by Zelda Williams and written by Diablo Cody, Lisa Frankenstein reanimates the Gothic romance for Gen Z with all the color and kitsch of an ’80s prom nightmare. Kathryn Newton plays Lisa, a misfit teen who literally rebuilds her dream man from the limbs of corpses — and in doing so, crafts the perfect metaphor for obsessive first love. Newton has called the film a “grief story in disguise,” and you can feel that ache beneath the quirk. Opposite her, Cole Sprouse plays the silent, stitched-together paramour with just enough melancholy to make their coupling both sweet and wrong. Shot in New Orleans by cinematographer Paula Huidobro (CODA), the film’s lush pastels and vaporwave palette make the horror feel sugarcoated — but its romance is hollowed out by possession. Cody’s script, like her Jennifer’s Body, treats love as consumption. Lisa Frankenstein may wear a neon grin, but its heart is embalmed.
4. Pet Sematary (1989)
Mary Lambert’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel remains one of the most devastating depictions of love’s refusal to die — literally. King himself penned the screenplay, and Lambert, fresh from directing Madonna’s Like a Prayer video, brought a gothic, feminine sensibility to a story of masculine denial. Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby play Louis and Rachel Creed, a couple whose grief turns the natural order inside out after the death of their son. King famously based the story on a real tragedy near his home in Maine, and Lambert’s direction never loses sight of that personal horror. The film’s final, horrifying kiss — the husband’s attempt to resurrect intimacy through rot — is the essence of romantic horror: tenderness curdled by delusion. Composer Elliot Goldenthal’s score underscores that tension with mournful strings that collapse into shrieks. Pet Sematary earned over $57 million on a $11 million budget, proving that audiences recognized in its despair something both relatable and unspeakable.
3. Videodrome (1983)
David Cronenberg’s Videodrome is what happens when eroticism and technology fuse into body horror. James Woods stars as Max Renn, a sleazye cable programmer who becomes obsessed with a sadomasochistic broadcast signal and the woman drawn to it — radio host Nicki Brand, played by Debbie Harry in her first major film role. Cronenberg cast her after seeing her Blondie persona as both sensual and self-destructive. Harry later said she was fascinated by Nicki’s “pleasure in danger,” a theme that echoes through Cronenberg’s entire filmography. Shot by Mark Irwin (The Fly, Scanners), the movie turns television into a flesh-eating organism, and love into a transmission you can’t turn off. The legendary practical effects by Rick Baker give physical shape to emotional surrender: videotape cassettes entering abdomens, lips pressed against screens. It grossed modestly ($2.1 million) but changed the lexicon of both horror and sci-fi. Its mantra — “Long live the new flesh” — reads like a dark vow between lovers who merge, then dissolve, inside the signal.
2. Candyman (1992)
Directed by Bernard Rose and based on Clive Barker’s short story The Forbidden, Candyman threads its horror through longing, guilt, and race. Tony Todd’s iconic ghost is less a slasher than a tragic revenant, bound to the woman who summoned him, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen). Their connection transcends time and reason — love as curse, not salvation. Madsen has said the role “felt like a dream or hypnosis,” and her damn-near romantic surrender to the character gives the film its hypnotic pull. Rose’s elegant direction, aided by Anthony B. Richmond’s cold, clinical cinematography (Don’t Look Now), frames the Chicago housing projects as both mythic and mournful. Philip Glass’s choral score adds a funereal beauty that feels closer to requiem than fright. On a $9 million budget, it made $25 million and spawned a few sequels as well as Nia deCosta’s reboot, but none could replicate its erotic dread — that whisper of intimacy inside Todd’s every wish for Madsen to “Be my victim.” The union of Helen and Candyman is both wedding and funeral, joined forever in the ashes of Cabrini-Green and pollenated by a million bees
2. Cemetery Man (1994)
Also known by its Italian title Dellamorte Dellamore (“Of Death, Of Love”), Michele Soavi’s haunting black comedy is one of the strangest and most beautiful horror films of the 1990s. Rupert Everett stars as Francesco Dellamorte, a cemetery caretaker whose undead tenants refuse to stay buried — and whose obsession with a mysterious woman (played by Anna Falchi) turns the film into a requiem for love itself. Each time she reappears, she’s someone new, yet he loves her all the same, unable to see that his desire is a loop without end.
Soavi, a protégé of Dario Argento, directs with painterly precision, drawing on Fellini’s surrealism and Romero’s nihilism. The film’s cinematographer, Mauro Marchetti, bathes its small Italian town in candlelit golds and graveyard blues, while Manuel De Sica’s melancholy score makes the whole thing feel like a dream already decomposing. At the time of its release, Cemetery Man was buried by poor distribution — only a limited U.S. release in 1996 — but has since earned cult status. Everett himself has called it “a love story with corpses,” and that’s exactly what it is: romantic horror distilled to its essence. Here, love doesn’t conquer death; it keeps digging it up.
1. Hellraiser (1987)
Written and directed by Clive Barker (his directorial debut) from his novella The Hellbound Heart, Hellraiser remains the definitive romantic horror — a literal marriage of pain and pleasure. Claire Higgins plays Julia Cotton, the bored wife who rediscovers her illicit lover Frank after he escapes hell, skinless and starving. Her decision to lure men to their deaths so he can be reborn is a perverse act of devotion — adultery elevated to ritual. Shot by cinematographer Robin Vidgeon and scored by Christopher Young, the film oozes operatic decadence, turning its North London house into a temple of lust and torment. Barker’s direction, though low-budget, feels painterly — unsurprising given his background as a visual artist. Doug Bradley’s Pinhead became a horror icon, but Hellraiser’s real heart is Julia, the tragic romantic who mistakes suffering for passion. The film grossed $14.6 million on a $1 million budget and made Barker a cult auteur. Love here is not redemptive — it’s the box you open and can never close.